I was waiting in line at my local hardware store, chatting with my friend about the jolly japes I would have as I made my voice heard during the upcoming post-inauguration marches, when a boorish bellow invaded my pink and shell-like ear:

“Oh, why don’t you libtards get over yourselves? Trump won the election, so sit down and shut up.”

Naturally, I whipped around and, before he could chortle too heartily at his witty bon mot, impaled him with my gimlet eye.

“You do realize that you have just committed an ignoratio elenchi fallacy, don’t you?”

“Huh?” was his penetrating response.

“An ignoratio elenchi fallacy. Or ‘ignorance of refutation.’ Derived from the apparent fact that you don’t quite understand what a refutation is. A refutation of a claim needs to be relevant to the claim being made. So, when you rudely interjected your unsolicited irrelevant remark into my private conversation, you’ve committed the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi.”

“Yeah,” said the nice young man who had helped me decide which brand of indelible magic markers I would use to write my protest signs. “The Critical Thinking Teacher was talking about the joys of exercising one’s First Amendments rights, and you barged in, saying that Trump won the election. As if that had anything to do with the price of beans in Boston.”

“That’s right,” my friend piped up. “The mere fact that Trump somehow managed to scrape together a sufficient number of Electoral College votes has absolutely no logical relationship to my friend’s observation that it would be jolly spiffing to remind the world that the majority of Americans reject his vicious agenda. You are raising an entirely different and unconnected issue.”

“But, but, isn’t that a red herring? Aren’t they the same thing?” Irksome Inter-meddler spluttered in dismay.

“Of course a red herring isn’t the same as ignoratio elenchi, you dolt.” An awed hush fell upon us. It was Ben, the store cat, known throughout the neighborhood for his disdain of poorly reasoned argument. “While they both have the effect of distracting the listener from the matter at hand, the red herring requires an intent to distract. Ignoratio elenchi, however, is usually the result of mindless blurting. Judging from your gormless expression, anyone with half an ounce of brain matter would easily discern that you are no more capable of forming an intent than I am capable of caring what you think.”

With that, Ben turned his back to us, curled himself into a ginger ball of fluffy cuteness, and slept the dreamless slumber of the purely contemptuous.

By this time, the rude oaf was transformed into a smoldering pile of ash, leaving me to contemplate the awesome and beautiful power of communal critical thinking. Nice!

However, after paying for the Sharpies (and while the nice young man was literally consigning the Trump supporter to the dust bin of history), I was struck by the implications of what Ben had said. It had been quite a busy week for our Twitter-in-Chief-Elect. First, he responded to Meryl Streep’s eloquent call-out of his general nastiness by posting a generally nasty tweet in which he called Streep “over-rated” (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/818419002548568064). [1] Similarly, after Representative John Lewis[2] stated that he didn’t think Trump was a legitimate president,[3] Trump blasted out this charming riposte:

Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk – no action or results. Sad! (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/820255947956383744).[4]

Aside from the utterly fact-free nature of these tweets,[5] it’s clear that these attacks are not related to the matter at hand. Even if Streep were such a has-been that she would deign to appear on Celebrity Apprentice, it has nothing to do with the fact that Trump’s “attraction” has a great deal to do with his xenophobic, misogynist, racist, and just generally vile rhetoric. Similarly, attacking John Lewis’s record in no way addresses the legion of issues that would give any thinking person pause before accepting the legitimacy of Trump’s occupancy of the Oval Office. Clearly, both tweets were a distraction.[6]

But were they intended as distractions, or are they merely the incontinent expressions of a chronically unsound reasoner? I have in a previous blog characterized the Streep tweet as a red herring,[7] but I’m beginning to have my doubts. The sheer volume of his tweets makes me think that he might be sincere in his beliefs, and his inability to make a single relevant refutation to any claim makes him a veritable ignoratio elenchi factory. On the other hand, I find it somehow more reassuring to think that he’s being deliberate. That would, at the very least, indicate that some thought is going into his actions.[8] At this point, I am leaning both ways—mostly because I don’t want to make that cold and lonely voyage into Trump’s mind that would be necessary to come to a definitive conclusion. And at the end of the day, regardless of Ben the cat’s opinion, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we, as warriors in the Critical Thinking Army, must be ever on the lookout for the irrelevant refutation—whether intended or not—and, when we find it, guide our readers and listeners to the real issue that it seeks to obscure.

[4] The dreadful irony of lashing out at John Lewis on the Saturday before Martin Luther King’s birthday holiday is apparently lost on Trump. Similarly, it’s fun to note that Lewis has accomplished more for humanity with his “talk, talk, talk” than all of Trump’s actions ever would, even if you lumped them all together in one unattractive heap.

[6] There were, of course, many, many other irrelevancies in this week’s outpourings from Trump’s twitter account, but I’ve been advised by my editorial board to keep these blogs short and sweet. But if you want a handy-dandy compilation of Trump’s oeuvre, then you really gotta check out The Atlantic’s “Trump Tweet Tracker” (https://www.theatlantic.com/liveblogs/2016/12/donald-trump-twitter/511619/). It’s a hoot.

[8] I have no problem with maintaining that Kellyanne is deliberately using red herrings. As a professional flunky, she would be expected to have the skillset necessary to deliberately throw sand in her opponents’ eyes.